One of the most chaotic scorelines in English football history involved two hat-tricks, a furious argument over a match ball, and a player who should have been lining out for Ireland but never got the chance.
Micky Quinn was the man at the centre of it all. The former Coventry City striker still talks about the legendary 6-6 draw against Liverpool in 1993 like it happened last week, and honestly, who could blame him. It was the kind of game that only comes around once in a lifetime.
Quinn scored three that day. So did Liverpool legend John Aldridge. Two hat-tricks in the same match, a scoreline that looked more like a basketball game, and a dressing room bust-up afterwards that almost overshadowed the whole thing.
The argument was simple. Both Quinn and Aldridge wanted the match ball. When two players bag hat-tricks in the same game, there is only one ball and two lads with an equal claim to it. Quinn has said the row got pretty heated before it was eventually sorted out. He ended up with the ball, though the details of exactly how that negotiation went depend on who you ask.
The game itself was a nightmare for both defences and an absolute gift for anyone watching. Coventry and Liverpool trading goals back and forth, neither side able to hold a lead for more than a few minutes at a time. Quinn was in the form of his life that season, proving himself as one of the most reliable finishers outside the top clubs in England.
But the Ireland angle to the Quinn story is one that does not get talked about nearly enough.
Quinn was eligible to play for the Republic of Ireland and by all accounts wanted to represent the country. This was the early 1990s, the Jack Charlton era, when Ireland were a genuine force in international football and had just come off the back of two World Cup campaigns that captured the whole nation. Getting into that squad meant something.
The problem was timing and competition. Ireland had no shortage of attacking options during that period. Niall Quinn, Tony Cascarino, and John Aldridge himself were all ahead of him in the pecking order. Jack Charlton had his system and his trusted players, and breaking into that setup was incredibly difficult even for someone putting up the kind of numbers Micky Quinn was producing week in week out.
He never got the call. Despite being eligible, despite scoring goals consistently at Premier League level, the Ireland cap never came. It is one of those what-if stories that lingers. A player good enough to score a hat-trick against Liverpool in a game that ended 6-6, never getting the chance to pull on a green jersey.
Quinn has spoken about it over the years without too much bitterness, which says a lot about his character. He understood the situation. Charlton had a settled squad and a very specific way of playing. If you did not fit the mould or were not already embedded in the setup, your chances were slim regardless of what you were doing for your club.
His career took him through Newcastle, Coventry, and several other clubs where he built a reputation as a no-nonsense centre forward who knew where the goal was. He was not the most graceful player on the pitch but he was effective, physical, and had a knack for being in the right place at the right time.
The 1993 match against Arsenal that Quinn also references from that period showed he could perform on the big stage too. Scoring against Arsenal was no small thing at a time when George Graham had built one of the most defensively solid sides in the country. Quinn had the ability to hurt top teams.
Looking back now, the 6-6 draw remains one of the great oddities of Premier League history. It gets brought up whenever people talk about the wildest results the league has ever seen. And at the heart of it was a player with Irish roots who gave everything he had on a football pitch, scored some memorable goals, and just never got the international recognition that might have completed the story.
The match ball from that Liverpool game reportedly still sits somewhere in Quinn’s home. A reminder of one of the strangest, most brilliant afternoons English football has ever seen.